Fall Of The Roman Empire Research Paper

This period of time takes place right after the Pax Romana, which was 200 years of Roman peace and prosperity. During this time, the Empire successfully conquered much territory, and new ideas emerged. The fall of the Roman Empire was caused by three major faults. First, the Roman Empire had several societal problems with religion and values/traditions. Next, the economy completely collapsed because of lack of money and high rates of unemployment. Finally, the Empire suffered from several issues with the military and invasions. Part of why the Roman Empire fell was because of massive social problems. Some of these social problems include issues with the common religion, and the values of the Romans. The original Roman religion was one in …show more content…
Without a sufficient amount of money and a high rate of unemployment, the economy collapsed. The Roman Empire didn't have enough money, and part of that was because of taxation. The government raised the taxes to an ungodly amount, and because of that barely anyone was able to pay them, or they just didn't want to pay them. Because people couldn't pay them, they had to stop working, and that caused there to be a lot less money in the economy, so the government had to raise taxes even higher; all of this continued, causing a vicious cycle to repeat over and over again. This caused the Empire to fall because without enough money, it wasn't able to support itself and its people financially or pay the many debts they had because the people kept buying and buying luxury goods they couldn't afford. Obviously, without money, a country/kingdom/empire etc. cannot survive, especially if it covers a vast amount of territory and peoples. High rates of unemployment also contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. A huge cause of unemployment was slavery, believe it or not. There were so many slaves that they began to "take" people's jobs. Farmers went out of business/lost their jobs because slave owners were producing so much agricultural products that small farmers weren't needed anymore. The unemployed farmers moved to cities in …show more content…
The Roman military had many issues, but one of the most profound was that the military was very weak. A lot of this was caused by the mercenaries that were employed. Mercenaries are foreigners who are paid to be in the military. This was a good idea in theory for Rome, but what ended up happening was that there were more mercenaries in the military than actual Roman citizens. The mercenaries didn't really follow Rome, but instead they followed the money. They didn't exactly care about Rome, they just wanted to get paid, and they did the least amount of work to do so. This helped to cause the fall of the Roman Empire because the troops didn't really listen and they struggled to defend Rome because of how weak the military was. This meant that Rome was a lot easier to be taken over, which leads to the next point of invasions. Obviously invasions are never good, and they just led to the downfall of Rome. These invasions were by people that are just simply called barbarians. Barbarians during this time were people who were not from the Roman Empire. They invaded the Empire several times, nothing was coordinated so they could never be predicted, and they came from all directions. The barbarians ended up taking out provinces of Rome, such as North Africa, and they sacked towns. The population dropped significantly. Without a strong military, the barbarians flooded